Description

The 1970s were a period of artistic growth and change for Luis Camnitzer. As he observed, “I stopped being a ‘printmaker,’ a ‘sculptor,’ or a ‘technician,’ and I turned myself into an ‘artist’ or a cultural worker.” Moving away from the print-based way of working that had defined his practice in the 1960s, he began to create objects. Exploring the associative possibilities of language, he created his series of Object Boxes (1973—78), which rearticulated the relationship between text and image, as well as installations like Leftovers (1970) that were informed by political repression and violence in Latin America. These works revealed, in Camnitzer’s words, “my increasing interest in minimizing form and isolating content as purely as possible.” At the same time, in 1971, he began selling his signature by the length and weight—a tongue-in-cheek critique of art world consumption. These disparate modes of working—Camnitzer once described them as “like loose leaves belonging to different books”—led him to reevaluate his approach to pairing words and images, ultimately enabling him to construct evocative, open-ended works that invited content while avoiding prescriptive readings. By the end of the decade, he writes, “By means of a controlled ambiguity, I was at last able to generate the terror of things. When confronted by the work, the viewer had the freedom of assuming the authorship of that terror or of remaining a consumer.”